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History as Psychological Reality-Transformation Tool Must Begin Well Before High School

We may never have thought of history as a means for altering our Identity–how we see ourselves and what guides how we are likely to behave in the future-but everyone with fundamental transformations on the mind seems to. The previous post’s steering through how all education pathways now seek to push communitarianism was a reminder that in the 21st century, the nation is no longer supposed to be “the community that defines history and political identity.” That quote was from the keynoter at the La Pietra Conference, Professor Prasenjit Duara. Thomas Bender in his Introductory essay to the 2002 Rethinking American History in a Global Age says that the “aim is to contextualize the nation” to avoid the “danger of complicity, conscious or not, in a triumphialism that justifies the current phase of capitalism.”

So if you ever wonder why I regularly see the need on this blog or in my book to discuss the economic transformation intentions, whose theories they are tied to, and why dramatically changing education to minimize anything that bolsters the continued validity of individualism, it is not because I am the One with the proverbial Bee in my Bonnet on this issue. Education may be the means to fundamental revolutionary transformations, hopefully without violence, but it is especially the purpose of subject-matter content that had to shift. Otherwise, traditional knowledge of any sort nurtures a reverence for the world as it is and provides hard factual info that prevents fully imagining a world as it might become. What reality supposedly should look like. When all coursework quietly turns into an examination of current social conditions, it becomes important to see the past in ways that justify and help ignite the passions to change today.

History not grounded to facts, but tied now to experiences, makes an important mechanism for student role-playing in alternative social worlds. Instead, of treating history and anthropology as separate subjects, that division is to be dissolved per Bender’s proposed new framework so that “peoples organized into nations, with literatures and archives” no longer have primacy over “all differently organized peoples.” There’s a good reason, in other words, why the NAACP and La Raza are so excited by the Common Core as a vehicle for transformative broader social change. Now let’s dive into elementary, middle, and high school classrooms to see precisely how classroom activities get reimagined to guide perceptions, nurture current grievances, heighten emotions, and shape Student Identity as if it were an overcoat to be taken on and off whenever cold winds shift.

These examples are all from a 2002 book called The Parallel Curriculum that caught my eye because I knew how involved one of the authors had been in developing the new Teacher and Classroom evaluations. See why factual knowledge is such a nuisance for those who view one of the “key goals of education itself–helping people understand the past in order to invent a future“? Again that would be a reenvisioned K-12 education that can create students with “a greater capacity to adapt to change.” Apparently having students with solid textbook knowledge who can tell a grasping mayor or legislator that “we fired King George for less overreaching than that” is in the way of our acceptance of being ‘governed’. So is any coursework that nurtures reverence for what social planners have long referred to derisively as the “distinctive organization of law in the United States” or the dreaded obstacle of the “practically cast-iron Constitution.”

In pursuit of not being the last Generation that Remembers, let’s delve into precisely what is planned. Think about how these activities and areas of emphasis play into the intention we are now aware of to inspire, or at least tolerate, fundamental transformations of current realities most of us take for granted. This is from a planned middle school history unit: “Throughout the year, three concepts are used to organize the curriculum: culture, continuity, and diversity. At the end of the second quarter all students will work with projects that ask them to use these concepts to compare their own culture with that of Russia. Many students will select or develop a family that is similar to theirs but that lives in Russia.”

Raise your hand if you think the unit will stress commonalities, not differences. One of my most frequent observations when reviewing planned activities is to recognize all the deliberate encouragement of inapt analogies. Here’s another example from 4th Grade Science: the class examines the weather ‘systems’ and “other systems (e.g. family systems, the school as a system and body systems.” Notice how natural systems that respond based on physical principles, that are not impacted at all by our intentions or understanding of how they work, are being married to social systems that supposedly involve the decisions of free individuals. This is a recurring theme and, in my opinion, why ‘systems thinking’ as a required component of Radical Ed Reform goes back decades and is now featured prominently in that July 2014 federal legislation, WIOA, defining workforce readiness for every student in every state in the US.

The 4th grade teacher is supposed to “help her students look at it through a conceptual lens, stressing the key concept, ‘system.'” What is ‘it’ referring to there, you ask? Why that would be the goal to have students “generate and test principles that would show the relationship between weather systems and ecosystems in general–and between weather systems and particular elements in ecosystems (animals, plants, rocks, and food chains.) ” As we can see the ecosystem assignment does leave out at this point the most dominant participant in ecosystems–real people–but it does a nice job of completely muddling in the child’s mind physical systems with natural laws and social systems that some people now hope to socially engineer. What nice preparation from an early age to simply accept such plans with nary a second thought.

That’s the advantage when K-12 education becomes about creating behaviors through “guided experience.” Where the student is to “understand [in that phronetic sense of the last post] the nature of the discipline in a real world manner” and then “assume a role as a means of studying the discipline.” Common Core would certainly have a greater PR hurdle, wouldn’t it, if it owned up to its real purpose of role playing various future behaviors until “what it feels like” becomes a “habit of mind.” So history, for example, becomes a “means of looking and making sense of the world” so that students can begin “escaping the rut of certainty about knowledge.” There is more in the book involving this Curriculum of Practice that can be used for all coursework that still has a content-oriented name. It is all anything other than the Transmission of Knowledge.

How about an elementary social studies class that uses the topic of the American Revolution as a reason to scan newspapers and news magazines “for the purpose of identifying contemporary revolutions.” Anyone else think Inapt Analogies are supposed to become a practiced habit of mind? So the topic of the American Revolution becomes “a means of thinking about causes of, reactions to, and potential effects of a contemporary cultural change.”

How about the new planned use of the Civil War in a 5th grade classroom? Instead of the past emphasis on “the events related to the Civil War…addressed in chronological fashion, moving from the causes…to the events and people involved in the battles and the war,” the teacher, “equipped with new knowledge about the importance of big ideas and concept-based teaching,” will have students spend four weeks looking at the livelihoods and economies of various people and groups. The book bold faces those big ideas like nation and federation and especially the plan to have 5th grade students examine “various perspectives within the emerging nation [notice this not-so-subtle intention to time bound the concept of the nation. Forged by the Civil War really and thus expendable as conditions change in the 21st] about state and civil rights issues.”

Next thing the Civil War becomes a vehicle for discussing “perspectives, viewpoints, balance, conflicts, compromise, consensus, and resolution” generally, which is certainly going to be handy since we have already encountered numerous explicit intentions to push shared understanding as the new required norm. Remember the posts on the Rockefeller-funded Communication For Social Change, the participatory governance push of Structured Design Dialogue, or the Discourse Classroom Courtney Cazden envisioned while on a Cold War trip to the USSR? Now the concept of civil itself becomes a means for the students to practice being “thinkers and analyzers.”

Want to guess what the exemplar of an ‘expert’ of the concept would be? Why that is described as the student belief that “People have civil wars when they can’t resolve their conflicts or achieve their rights peaceably.” Peace is always the answer then. At least until we discover actual evidence in illegal tunnels leading to day care centers of plans to kidnap children during Jewish holidays or, more likely, the actual terrorist event like the World Trade Center occurs. The listed example of an expert acquisition of the desired Principles and Rules is that “Empathy, compromise, and consensus, can be used to resolve conflicts peacefully because they honor individual perspectives and values.”

That’s what Chamberlain naively thought in 1938 because he lacked Churchill’s deep grounding in actual history of events. Destined to repeat itself is a lousy way to face the future just because it is conducive to social planning and engineering by the politically-connected few against the many. To end with that Civil War quilt I mentioned, an individual interpretation of the scenes depicted on the quilt and whether their “conclusions are well supported in information they had studied” is simply an excuse for All Propaganda All the Time.

Now to all this, let’s add on being able to depict any scenario desired in the virtual reality brought in through the laptop or IPad.

Will the next generation know anything that is true?

Or will everything be guided by what is influential in building support for fundamental transformations?

32 thoughts on “History as Psychological Reality-Transformation Tool Must Begin Well Before High School”

When the Internet becomes fully regulated to align with Common Core Global Awareness, nothing will be allowed that counters the approved narrative. If it isn’t “empathetically building consensus on the need for change,” it will be blocked, and the attempted poster will get a visit from the suits and begin suffering lifetime annual income tax, home energy usage and food choice audits. The only freedom left with be the freedom to explain yourself to your assigned Federal Agent.

“Nobody should even want to see anything that isn’t promoting the kind of future we all need.”

Skepticism, inquiry, and complaint will be deemed as hate crimes.

Right now, you can go to jail in Europe and Canada just for asking certain unacceptably obnoxious questions about WWII history. Just wanting clarifying knowledge about persistent narratives is too subversive to be tolerated.

chailatte-it is hard to look at the willingness to turn over control of the Internet to UN entities as not tied ultimately to censorship.

There is also an attempt to tag online pieces a la Concepts so that it will be harder for someone like me who regularly hears a phrase being used as a “term of art” and then comes home and looks it up to see where it originated and who created it.

I reminded about Courtney Cazden’s trip because Ann Brown who created the Fostering Communities of Learners concept that principals are now to be measured by and Michael Cole, Our ISCAR sponsoring Cultural Historical Activity Theory creating professor were on the same trip. Courtney mentions it in a footnote and I knew of course who the others were.

With these kinds of activities in the K-12 classroom, we can easily see how it will transform prevailing culture and thus impact reality using the Marxian definition of what constitutes history.

I think we have established I would be on the Alpha list of people for reeducation. I just want the very recognition of the goal of diminishing the presence of Axemaker Minds to become an anthem for people to sharpen their minds to disingenuous arguments and inapt metaphors to the point that diamonds and lasers should be worried.

There is a big story directly connected to this post and that is LIBRAIRIES!!!! The biblioteque
sans biblio. ( the fire in Alexandria without the smoke is equivalent)
Now in schools ( including my kids) transitioning or already changed to Community Centers. Card catelogue incinerated. Books weeded into oblivion and computers replaced.
Not just school libraries but public libraries as well. Your random tatoo’d porn watchers and an old lady looking for a romance novel on tape.
Nary a book other than multiple copies of silent spring.
GATES GATES GATES….
See ” better world books” scandal and look for grants to revitalize libraries. Around 2008. The new service center for passport apps, social service babysitting, community unity events, progressive meet n greets and voter registry.
Anything but history!!!!!
Read the librarian change agent blogs…
The stage is being set for exactly what you describe above… And all done with our tax dollars and proceeds from taxpayer purchased antique book proceeds…

mad mommy-some where in what I read in the last several days was that exact point, pushing the concept of a mediatheque instead of a bibliotheque. printed text is quite the bugaboo for the reason I described in the book. It also ties to the discussion I had with Mari over equating access to a computer data base as equivalent to personal knowledge. More inapt analogies.

One of the reasons there is not a dispute at the level I am at is because I find this old books, created before controversy, that are referred to in footnotes by other radicals.

In a purely digital world, someone would have long since hit the delete button. You may also have noticed I do not talk about the tangents I am pursuing until after I have locked down proof.

Gates also has an interest in voice activated software that would eliminate a need to have to read at all. Mush brains are clearly an attraction if diminishing individualism and promoting collectivism is the point. I have also noticed that David Loye in 2005 is looking for a benefactor and describes Gates, George Soros, and Ted Turner as the kind of progressive philanthropists he could work with. Now the Darwin Project website of GERG still exists but does not appear active. It’s as if the project has gone underground.

Never forget also that Loye is married to Riane Eisler or that Nel Noddings is a friend, fellow GERG member, and wrote the Foreword to her book. Noddings also is consulting in Australia on social and emotional learning.

Ten years ago I heard many of these phrases and concepts in a teacher-training program, specifically visual art teacher training. “Big Ideas”, empowerment, social justice… being pounded into our heads as the the way to be a really good, cool, hip, with-it “useful idiot” of an art teacher and thereby get a job, or grants.
Even without Common Core and it’s aligned curricula and subsequent testing, teachers were urged to empower and create the empty-mindedness (called mindfulness nowadays) . And similar things in a reading instruction course I was required to take also. Group projects were urged for both reading and art… and that was ten years ago. Much of what we see coming on strong in Common Core was around for a long time, (That is why suddenly so much garbage is appearing as if out of nowhere in kid’s homework… it’s been sitting on a shelf or in the back of teachers minds all along) but now I think the testing and the computer-based ‘analysis’ of our kids will be used (fraudulently) to gauge how well the empowerment and mind-less-full-ness training works.

Remember the movie “Ghost Busters” when the original two busters hire Winston, and they rattle off a list of paranormal activity and practices that the new hire must believe in? And Winston says “If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe in anything.” That’s what it’s like to become a teacher… you must be ready to believe in and instruct whatever curriculum or by whatever method, no matter how looney it seems to your good sense of logic, reason, knowledge, experience or morality.

And now, the teachers are reinforcing and watching each other via cooperative teaching, “teaming” and faculty group therapy delphi sessions…

Thanks George and welcome to ISC. I was at the rollout of the new tiered certification here in Georgia in early July. It’s tied to TNTP and Charlotte Danielson’s work. The behavioral emphasis was truly tragic and there was so much deceit surrounding the rationales.

And you are right, there was an atmosphere of “I’ll do whatever I am told to do to get a reliable middle class job with benefits.”

In my book I have a quote from Elliott Eisner on Aesthetics and John Dewey’s purposes that your posts reminds me of.

George-just a heads up, edX is now providing MOOCs for high school and https://www.edx.org/school/high-school-initiative AP Comp is one of those listed. Hard to imagine these MOOCs will not impact what happens in regular classrooms with those courses. It further standardizes what it will mean to ‘know’ in any of these areas.

Robin, funny you should address history in your post today. There is a lengthy article in the New York Times Sunday edition on Bill Gates’ vision of teaching history in American classrooms. Not sure who made him the master of the universe.

Vivian-if you go back two posts to Mischievous Masquerade you will see we are having a conversation about that very article today, some of what I know about Big History from a post more than a year ago, and our general belief it was a major whitewash.

Too much is left out for this to just be sloppy. When I started the trilogy after making the connection to La Pietra and WOMP, it was Big History as the end game I had in mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBCvpIK7g8U is a youtube of Christian and William McNeill talking about why they want these metanarrative synthesizing views.

Here’s the quote: “In the AP Curriculum Module on Native Americans, Geri Hastings, one of the most influential authors of the redesigned APUSH Framework, follows up Anderson’s account with a lesson plan. She asks students to imagine that they’ve been hired by “an eighteenth-century human rights organization.” Their job is to decide whether the British, French, or Spanish colonizers had treated the Indians more harshly, “and to indict the harshest colonizer for ‘crimes against humanity.’”

Now how anachronistic is the very concept of an 18th century human rights organizations. To the extent they existed they were the people in England and the Colonies fighting against the slave trade who did finally succeed in both countries. But that would not create the feelings of outrage and the desires to take actions for transformation in the present that ‘thinking like a historian is really designed to create.

So…should we steer our kids clear of these courses? Would boycotting them only hurt their transcripts? Let them take the course but make sure you deprogram them at home? Can they really escape these intentions anywhere outside of AP? How exactly do we fight this? Do most parents even bother know many (or any) details of what there kids are getting in school? I suspect that many parents sending their kids to public schools feel that having them in AP or IB is securing a good, “rigorous” education same as those parents doling out the money for private prep schools…

JL-knowing what is going on is a start. I can still remember discovering during taking a group of 9th graders from my house to the Honors Bio exam that the course had become systems thinking. or that the 10th Grade Honors Kit class was doing discussions on minimum wage instead of reading. I could go on but yes appreciating it’s not knowledge transmission anymore is absolutely a good start.

I agree there is no way out and the College Board is very aware of that. It’s why they hired David Coleman to make sure that AP aligned with what he and others created under the banner of the Common Core. Having quite a few of the CB’s books from the 90s version of CC, they did not need persuading. These frameworks as I have said were developed long before David’s new, well-compensated, grand adventure.

My experience is that the parents willing to know are few and far between. On the privates, I suggest you read the discussion in the comments on the post that started this trilogy Mischievous Masquerade. In many places the private luge is moving at an even speedier pace down the mountain.

My job with the book and now this blog is to make accurate info available to the parent or teacher who does want to know. One aspect I never appreciated when I started this blog was the searches coming in. I know what is going on in professional development in real time from the alarmed teachers coming home and doing a search on what troubled them. Then they discover I have already written about it. I know what’s being pushed and when.

Knowledge matters and make sure your children know that. Appreciate the Whole Child elements and that many of the trainers acknowledge it is grounded in what used to be called New Ageism. If you can afford a tutor ask them to pretend the world is as it used to be and make sure they can write and still appreciate the majesty of a first rate word.

JL-A reader asked me offline what ‘rigor’ means, but my email reply is bouncing back. Since they are probably not the only new reader curious where I have explained this in the past, here is my response:

It’s not rigorous if there is a single unambiguous answer even if one must marry physics and calculus to know how to find that answer.

Story about young girl that needs to post her freshly drawn picture on facebook so her school friends can “like” it before she will know whether it’s good or not. Author puts different spin on it, but I’m thinking “voice of the collective”. This dovetailed so well with your referenced post I wanted to make sure you saw it.

Thanks Mike. That’s indeed consistent with the push to make Identity something institutions and other people construct for you. It merely feels like a facade that can be easily repainted or shifted as needs changed. No sense of the Timeless. Not a human Being who would ever conceive of defying the Herd.

The Glossary would need to be done as some type of e-book pdf. I have talked to several experienced Internet savvy types about it and that’s what they tell me.I do have that knowledge and am just starting to get time back now that my youngest can drive. Unfortunately she has just learned that crucial contact lens life lesson most teenagers learn from bad experiences-Do Not Wear Them Too Long.

Back to chauffeuring mode for me for at least a week.

The tags serve some of that function in the meantime as will that search for box at top right of blog. I keep notebooks of all my old posts as a reference so I can usually locate a particular post where I first introduced something as well.

I raised this issue a few years ago over at the Core Knowledge blog when the Education Commission of the States gave Hirsch a lifetime achievement award and Robert Pondiscio used that as proof that the Common Core was going to be content rich. In their late 80s book New World New Mind Moving Toward Conscious Evolution authors Paul Ehrlich (yes, that one) and Robert Ornstein who are pushing a similar kind of phronetic Arational intuitive mind to what “thinking like an expert” really means in the social sciences cite Hirsch by name. They say that they disagree with his push of factual knowledge since it is an obstacle to the new kind of mind they hope for, but that Hirsch showed that the curriculum in the classroom has to be targeted for change to get the new kinds of minds and behaviors that are the true purpose of Radical Ed Reform. In other words what is currently known as the Common Core and was then usually called outcomes based education.

I think that is still the sense in which Hirsch is the father of the Common Core along with perhaps the explicit desire to provide the interpretive schemas and conceptual lenses that will guide perception. When the advocates say they intend to explicitly teach content they mean those concepts or disciplinary principles of the kind explained in this post. That’s not the sense Hirsch means but he is a bit too busy to follow particular curriculum initiatives like I do.

I think many Left supporters and Right critics were always interested in the digital learning/Whole Child synthesis along with the ties to a planned economy via workplace readiness. I think both sides find it frustrating that the book lays out that intended synthesis because I followed the legal mandate for what had to go on in the classroom and not the rhetoric. My parents, husband, and children could all have told anyone who asked that I can be annoyingly prescient in what I see at a glance.

Clearly wants to reassure parents that they can simply dismiss whatever CC hype they have heard. Carry on, it will be fine. It’s not about Bill Gates.

No but it is primarily behavioral and about new kinds of minds and social and emotional competencies and it’s a very effective effort to deflect busy parents. We all wish we had that teacher, but that is not how classrooms are working this year.

I went to Israel in 1973, just after Christmas, when my uncle, a Methodist minister took a group two months after the Yom Kippur War. I learned what intractable truly means and remember being able to hear shelling in the Golan heights. We then went on to Rome for a few days and when we landed at Da Vinci there was a bombed out fuselage pulled off the runway from a hijacking. This truly is a terrible time to shift away from accurate knowledge to hyping subjective perceptions as the new goal.

13 years ago today made far more sense to those of us familiar with Osama Bin Laden before that day. Accurate knowledge matters now more than ever and no one should have to have well-educated parents with time to explain the world to their families to have access to it.

Robin,
You certainly have an interesting life! What great adventures you have been on. A lifetime of being Army Brat took me many places as well, but not Israel. Would love to see it one day.
For me this day is bittersweet, but I choose to celebrate. Today 17 years ago God blessed me with a little boy. It is not an easy day to have a birthday on now! The bittersweet side being that I remember the day well, catching the news before heading out to a Phleb class. Later, both my father and brother shipped out. Five years more in addition to his 26 already served (not his first rodeo) for my Dad, his location not known to us but middle eastern, and my brother in Iraq as a helicopter paramedic. Both returned, praise God, but not unscathed. Both have very interesting stories on what they seen there. Not anything like what was reported to us here. Perception is indeed a funny thing.

Since we have discovered a big part of the true stealth agenda behind the CCSS is about redoing the nature of high school without enough people recognizing the polytech shift in time, I thought I’d read it. Then I saw they were writing about Portland, Oregon.

Notice the author thanking Vicki Phillips, now at Gates, Michelle Rhee, and Uri Treisman (head of the Dana Center and Ground Zero for constructivist math).

So you have a birthday boy today. Your oldest then is about the age of my youngest. She can finally drive herself to her lessons and to school. I am about to get my life back. Hooray!

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED480210.pdf is from 2001 and Portland, Oregon was one of the systemic reform districts selected by Pew Charitable Trusts to pilot what happens when standards (as with CCSS behavioral in basis), assessments, and accountability come together. Per our offline discussion, this also seems to be what David Coleman was pushing with his Grow Network that he created in 2000. It appears to me that the Grow Network may well have taken over Marc Tucker and Lauren Resnick’s New Standards Project from the 90s version when it became too notorious to continue under its own name.

We know David was also involved with these high school reform efforts of Aspen’s because he shows up on the list of 2005 Workshop participants. The financing for Student Achievement Partners fits with the financing for the workshop.

It all fits with polytech vision never going away nor wanting values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to be the true focus just as book lays out. References to ‘content’ in the 2006 report obscure the fact that it is not referring to subject-matter content. The desired ‘outcome’ or student performance is the content. The desired concepts to be shown using in ambiguous activities with no fixed answer are the ‘content.’ The content is whatever the school wants to see changed.

Remember how I explain learning progressions in the book? That is skills or concepts that should come into play in any activities in any subjects as well as concepts within a domain like fractions for example.

I would be an ideal 21st century learner these past few days as a synthesizer extraordinaire except I am building up my own conceptual understandings from cited reports. Oopsy.

In a STEM report I read this week, it actually said that the schools should also build in related Agenda 21 concepts like healthful communities and well-being. It’s a good time to have the broad template from the book on how this all basically fits.

So you think that Coleman was selected or put in place to continue the project on under new names? Robin, is the point of the desired new student behavior just to benefit the profiting companies or to change the US over to a socialist based country? In OR we have two very different sides of the fence for those opposed to CCSS. One side only cares about the testing and the companies making a profit, teacher evals. The other side cares about freedoms, big Government, privacy, economic matters. If Coleman was picked for this job, who picked him? How does his selection tie into the coda from the book, besides Green Growth? Private companies, or his family heritage of radical reformers? Hope those are not silly questions to ask.

No, not silly. Yale? Rhodes Scholar? McKinsey? All would have been grooming grounds for bringing about this Marxist Humanist vision if you are viewed as having ‘potential’. At least that’s what one of the WOMP primary participants, W Warren Wagar, wrote. Wagar, you may remember, is who brought HG Wells’ The Open Conspiracy back into print in 2002. With his mom as the Dean of the New School there’s no telling who Coleman met growing up in NYC. He could have known Harlan Cleveland for example who headed the Aspen Institute in the 70s back when they thought we needed a Declaration of Interdependence while we were excited about the Bicentennial. Remember Carnegie is backing high school reform as well as WOMP and now Competency-Based and Next Generation Learning. If his mother so thoroughly worships John Dewey’s political vision as she indicates in her TED Talk, David probably shares that transformational vision as well. It certainly would fit with all his activities and view of the curriculum.

The most helpful book for me remains what Anthony Carnevale wrote on the Workplace Basics and the idea is that nothing that goes on in the school ignites that Axemaker Mind and much that goes on trains the student to act as a reflex to certain conditions and environments and to see the world in desired ways as a matter of emotion and intuition. The performance standards grounded in social science, a specialty of the New School by the way, all use the same Nonlinear, Arational, intuitive concept of mind that I wrote about here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/blending-sustainability-and-education-to-gain-arational-nonlinear-minds-and-new-behaviors/

The Left likes the idea of a politically planned economy because they get to decide who benefits. The Chamber crowd likes the idea that it is politically planned because they already view themselves as a lobbying trade group for political favors. When I speak I always tell groups about the slide presentations made to businesses hyping the formerly big companies like Worldcomm and DEC that are gone now.

Remember me explaining about the UN wanting to approve innovations going to the manufacturing stage? Major boon for existing technology and an obstacle to the next great invention, at least in the US. Carnevale says employers can just train employees in the specifics needed. It’s a very dysfunctional vision brought to us via government grants, conflicts of interest, charitable foundations, and tenured profs.

Remember my posts about the Great Transition being pushed by the Tellus Institute and the OECD with UNESCO’s support? The Green Growth phase has now gone even further. So when someone says “what you write about scares me,” the lack of common recognition of what is being sought and why is what keeps allowing the aims to get worse. Widespread acknowledgment for example that the Common Core is not subject-matter content standards is a start, but as the APUSH controversy shows, even that undeniable fact is still not widely enough recognized by most of the writers critical of the Common Core. Not enough people grasp what a performance standard is. I will try to remedy that next. Had to deal with a sick child today. Nothing like Friday afternoon in the doctor’s office to turn a brain to mush.

I think I will read that post, in the horror flick pose, hand over face but still peeking!

As you know, many of the feel good words in the Common Core dictionary have meanings that differ from what we parents think they mean. Have you ever written those key words or phrases and their true definitions in a blog post? If you had such an item, it would be an excellent source for parents to take with them to meetings. Helping us to decipher all that Eduspeak. We could be armed with Robin’s list of exposed terms. A great B.S detector.

This is actually a really good thought. I’ve been thinking something like that would be a good resource here. I know it would take time, but even a limited list, with definitions and citations, would be a very powerful tool.

EXPOSE TERMS. Great Idea. This is why I asked about the current definition of RIGOR. I follow your posts faithfully and have your book, but with no glossary it is difficult to reference terms. Perhaps a side bar addition to the blog? Checked your book, Robin, before I asked via email. Sure you must have LOADS of free time to create this resource.

Read an interesting fact this weekend. Coleman’s father is a psychoanalyst. That sure does come in handy if your mom is friends with Resnick, Tucker and others who want to change human beings and play with the development of the whole child in the realms of consciousness.
Another interesting fact, Coleman is said to have a very large photo of MLK hanging behind his desk. Not unexpected since he likely shares his mothers view of the U.S. having an “education debt” to minorities. No qualms there on pushing equity for all.

Let’s not forget that the creator of the term, Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi or Csik as I shorthand him calls himself a phenomenologist so it is subjective interpretations of experiences he cares about and wants the classroom to emphasize. So do all the Civil Rights groups pushing Equity and Excellence as well as the recent federal commission.

Secondly, Csik and Bela Banathy (also has tag) who is cited in that post were both members of that GERG cultural evolution group along with Riane Eisler, Nel Noddings, Ervin Laszlo, and the David Loye who wrote The Great Adventure book that brought Structured Design Dialogue back on our radar. All of these people come up repeatedly when you track the actual implementation. It was only later we learned about GERG and the Darwin Project and later the Holos Consciousness. One way to think of it is Excellence and Quality Learning will ultimately yield a student with a Holos Consciousness as an adult. Csik and Banathy though first created that term Excellence in the 80s shortly after GERG was created. As you probably remember, with support on both sides of the Iron Curtain. More events from the 80s seemingly geared towards bringing about a convergence of East and West around a mindset mostly Eastern in influence.

Maybe they can print up T-shirts to go with the diplomas and titles “We destroy children’s lives for personal profit.”

Remember in the book I wrote about the Assistant Principal who wanted to sign her name as if Doctor was her new first name? She was a product of the Vandy EdD program created by the same prof Joseph Murphy who is behind these standards. He has been on my radar for a while.